Jenny and Bill

By Robbie on March 4, 2009

I have a little to share on the opening of "Our Town" -- the show, the party, the reviews -- but while it's fresh in my mind I want to indite some quick lines on a show I saw last night, Jenny Scheinman and Bill Frisell at the Barbes in Brooklyn.  Jenny has a weekly residency at this pocket-sized bar, and I start up with her next Tuesday; so part of the reason for coming was to check out the place and what kind of gig it might be.  There was a very good turnout for a small place on a cold weeknight; as I arrived it stretched from the performance room to the door at the other end of the bar.  I got out my Blackberry and wrote an e-mail to Mrs. Fulks titled "At Barbes": "I am in a long line.  There are no women in it."  A little later, after finding a seat near the stage next to the fine guitarist Richard Julian, I took another look around the audience and spotted three women.  "Is there something about this music that women don't like?" I asked Richard.  He shrugged.  "Looks like my audience," he said.  Mine too, pretty much.  

Bill played a blond Telecaster at a low volume, with a green four-button foot pedal (how about this fancy gear talk?) that gave him access to a delay and a couple pre-recorded pieces, like the one at the end of the version of "You Are My Sunshine" that closed the show, a Tinkerbell fairydust of notes that was both unexpected and amazing.  Jenny played violin near a mike and sang two songs, out of eight or nine ("Happy Woman Blues" and "King of Hearts" by Lucinda Williams, "Embraceable You," and some familiar instrumental pieces from Jenny's records whose titles I couldn't remember) over an hour-and-a-half-long set.  She also made some absent-minded vocal noises as she played. The noises were soft at the source, but the source was six inches or so closer to the mike than the holes of the violin, and so the evening really provided a trio of sounds, one of them infrequent, ghostly, and less deliberate.

Both these musicians are heavy-signature players, as I said previously of Rick Danko and Levon Helm -- you can tell it's them from a couple bars at twenty paces.  No doubt this describes all master players, and yet the combination of deep technique and bold, or sometimes boldly weird, personality -- how they come into conflict, and how the second can ride over the first -- interests me.  It looked to me like Bill's left hand sometimes jerked between positions in a way that clearly violated an easiest-path-between-two-points way of playing.  I mean that a first-year music teacher might have "corrected" such an inclination, as well as the thumb that hung around the neck and now and then was pressed into work on the sixth string.  The persistence of this kind of idiosyncrasy is perhaps a testament to an early or inborn attitude of healthy defiance, and some luck with personal influences.  Especially because there is a lot of gentleness and silky slyness in Bill's touch and tone, a little galumphing muscularity in the fretting hand adds beauty and complexity to his guitar work.  Because you can hear the hands working a little, in the spaces between position changes or, now and then, the twang of a crudely plucked note, you don't think "ornamental" even when his playing is at its prettiest.  There are many prodigy guitarists with easeful, transparent, feathery touches working nowadays -- Bryan Sutton, John Jorgenson -- and I like them too, but I do think Bill has staked out a lonelier and stranger spot.  His plaintiveness is like Jim Hall's, and his touch, to my ears, mysteriously closes some of the distance between solidbody and archtop.

Another interesting point about personality trumping tradition (not exactly synonymous with "technique" but close enough) is how it violates some received wisdom about cultivating an audience and then entertaining it.  A lot of the incentive to sound like "everyone else" (whoever that is in your style and time) comes from the proposition that an audience wants what it already knows and knows it likes.  There's a lot of truth both theoretical and empirical in this claim, as scores of audience-survey cards, Bob Dylan's 1965 tour, modern neuroscience, and one's own experience in a wide variety of performing situations all demonstrate.  But players like Jenny and Bill started sometime, and you have to imagine that they sounded a lot like they do now, and that people objected, or didn't get it.  Yet others appreciated it in its newness, and they developed solid careers and sizable audiences.  Maybe there are more adventurous-minded art-lovers in a large and diverse population than we might realize by, for instance, turning on the radio.  Or maybe there are just enough to create a tipping point.  After you've convinced so many listeners, others will come along just by the attractive force of the chatter-vibration.  

At times last night I got lost during abstract passages.  I wondered where in the form we were, or if there was a form, or how indeed the players knew where they were.  A feature of NRBQ's performances, twenty and thirty years back, that mystified and excited me, was: how did they start a song up, all together and at breakneck speed, without a count, a call, or even a perceptible glance?  You sort of figure out the tricks with time and experience, but then you see a pair of great players working in a complex and less-familiar genre, and it's a mystery again!  Jenny and Bill had a music stand between them but it wasn't always easy to tell when it was coming into play. No doubt I betray my musical primitiveness and lack of training.  If we are playfully flexing the boundaries of a known shape -- a chord progression based in blues fit into a familiar parcel of time -- then I can join the fun, but when one progression is overlaid on another, or the time signatures get math-y, or marked time is abandoned altogether, a philistine like me can get uneasy, and grow distracted.  I wondered again about the audience, those rapt and willing males.  Could they be led anywhere at all? Were they not thrown by the moments of casual chaos or suspended momentum?  I brought this up with Richard, who said, "They probably just like the sound."  A useful reminder -- I might be overthinking it.

I've said more about Bill than Jenny only because I know the instrument better. Speaking of the conceivable paradoxes and problems created by an honest effort to balance personality against tradition/technique in music, here's one -- the more you sound like nobody but yourself, the harder it can become to fit yourself naturally into a wide variety of situations.  A reductio example: Thelonius Monk soloing on a Rose Maddox record.  They, and we, might've loved the idea, but could the great pianist have pulled that off, made his thing fit with hers?  I think a lot of us who have made records have had the experience of wanting a master player for this or that track, then discovering that that player, the one who seems so boundless and colossal in his or her own music, is unable to fit with much ease or even basic capability into yours.  Not that playing on your records is such an honor and thrill that every hotshot should be slobbering after the opportunity, rather that every good player is interested in any good music (knowing it, playing it), or ought to be.  With age you tend to settle into a single culture, style, vocabulary -- a routine pitfall that, with the addition of a strong signature, can become a positive onus for the player who wants the ongoing challenge and pleasure of promiscuous collaboration. This is all to get back to Jenny, who has created for herself a style that melds the touch of a classically trained violinist with the plainness of a folk fiddler.  Hearing her is a little like getting an exquisite gift by a homely or no-nonsense method of delivery, like having your dog bring you a partridge intact.  Her style has the advantage of identifiability and blatant, unique expressiveness yet seems capable of fitting anywhere -- I suppose that, like Bill, her being less aggressive and show-offy than a lot of heavy players, her ability to go simple or scratchy or reckless with no apparent risk to her ego, is much to credit for this. 

I'm getting tired of writing, but let me say once more how excited I am to get to play with folks as good as this -- well, come on, let's not overlook Robbie Gjersoe, Grant Tye, Gerald Dowd, Mike Fredrickson, Danny Barnes, Casey Driessen, Sam Bush, Lloyd Green, Dennis Crouch -- Jesus Christ!  It just never stops.  Make it stop!  Doing the next few Tuesdays with Jenny at Barbes is sure to be one of the highlights of my year (and what a great little club!).